More Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram Than You Can Shake A Magic Wand At

Next week, Namco Bandai will release a Madoka Magica game for PlayStation Vita. Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Battle Pentagram has an original story where Madoka and her friends hunt witches during Walpurgis night. During the day you can talk to the other magical girls and build up your relationship which changes how you work together at night.

Looks fun, kinda sad how importing sounds like the only option. It’d be nice to have an English translation though keep the Japanese audio, but chances sound slim to none.

PreyMantis

Are they trying to relive us that horrible experience with the last video? I’m gonna lose my head, man!

Kayseur

The more I look at those vids, the worse it seems to get. It actually has potential, but it really looks like they didn’t care much about the game when making it. I mean, did I really see Mami getting up in the air when getting hit by Charlotte? No hit animation? No bouncing on the floor or against attacks? And Homura gets revived magically reappearing on her foot without even a couple of frame in-between?

Plenty of those kind of details seem to be lacking, and I’m not even talking about the HUD that is still plain ugly (I had hoped they’d revamp it before the actual release, looks like they didn’t, but I think I’d do a better job in 10 minutes on Photoshop.).

And of course, despite all of that, it looks like there’s some framerate issue when lots of things is going on on screen. A shame.

Still looks fun if you’re a fan of the franchise, but really, that’s the kind of fun I’d expect from a fan-game (such as Grief Syndrome) not a professional one. That said, I think I’ll satisfy myself with such fan-game quality, even though I expected a bit more from a Madoka game given how dynamic and flashy the Shaft animation was.

Beyond ugly, that HUD is not very thoughtful. It has some horrible placement of everything and wastes space on huge anime stock pictures. It’s pretty obvious whoever created the HUD has no idea what’s intuitive design.
Of course, given their core audience they probably wouldnt really care much about minor things like proper game design.
These type of musou games seem to have a bad stigma whenever a devs aren’t familiar with the genre.

Shippoyasha

I think in order to emulate the anime, they need to go into Naruto/Jojo style engines of CyberConnect2 but I’m not sure a budget game would have that kind of fidelity available for them. For a budget game, it looks pretty good, even though I agree it looks very janky at spots. Funny thing too, is that Shaft is a budget anime studio but they valiantly do a great job despite that.

Kayseur

Of course, what they need most is time and money, and they don’t have it. But I wasn’t expecting anything stellar like a CC2 game quality-wise. Which is why what I pointed out as examples are simple details that could be easily corrected, even with a low budget (I haven’t talked about the whole low-res texture or low-polygon count, which I don’t care much about given that it is a budget game).

TrueDefault

I’m not saying the Vita is a bad machine but I’m guessing clunky graphic is why they published the game on Vita, it’s more acceptable I guess.

The graphics may not look the best, but I’d be playing it for the story, anyway. Plus it sounds like the game has some sort of social link system between the girls, which would be fun to play with. I hope we get this localized!